Designer of the Year 2014: Sarah Burton

Read the full interview with the Alexander McQueen designer and Bazaar award winner

Taking her friend and mentor Alexander McQueen’s eponymous label to new heights, Burton continues to surprise and delight with her opulent, romantic designs. Andrew O'Hagan salutes the British fashion powerhouse

The first time I met Sarah Burton, my favourite designer, she showed me a rail of iconic frocks and shed a few tears over memories of things past. She was honest. She was brilliant. And I felt there was a new woman standing in front of me, someone with a natural talent not only for making clothes but for making them sing and dance and rock with suggestion. I love how eager she is to embrace her contradictions and keep moving onwards and inwards, discovering new things in herself and new things in the world around her. With her blonde hair and gentle features, with her ready laughter and a sense of infinite jest, Sarah can be viewed as one of those pioneering English women who establish their genius quietly, but after much darkness. When I left her that first day, it seemed obvious to me that Burton was on the cusp of a great new period. ‘Clothes change our view of the world,’ said Virginia Woolf, ‘and the world’s view of us.’

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The darkness I spoke about diminished, after a while, into a new dawn for Sarah. Her annus horribilis was 2010, the winter her great friend, mentor and long-term working partner (Lee) Alexander McQueen killed himself, at the age of 40. She mourns him every day, but part of the spirit they shared was the instinct to get on and do it. She is always keen to preserve his reputation, and is putting a lot of effort into ‘Savage Beauty’, a show of McQueen’s work that will open at the V&A in March. ‘It’s going to be an amazing exhibition,’ she says. ‘There was such a magic about Lee, and the show is going to capture it. I want everybody to see it. Someone asked if we could end the exhibition with the wedding dress I made for the Duchess of Cambridge, but I said no. This show is about the brilliance of Lee.’

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But what has also become clear in recent times – and what makes her the perfect choice as 2014’s Designer of the Year – is that Burton’s own brilliance, her own sensual, hauntingly elegant work, with its decadent undertones, subtle references and dazzling ideas, had come into its own in a timely fashion. She has always had an insightful way with materials and patterns – one of the reasons Lee McQueen loved her so much – but time has brought out the deep and wayward romantic in Burton. She is now making clothes that define for an international audience what it means to believe in the previously unthinkable, and has become, of all the creative charmers, a woman with seemingly limitless reserves of enchantment to call upon. Her hugely anticipated shows are more various and the ideas are more durable than those of a great number of her contemporaries.

Perhaps it’s the fact that she doesn’t start from an outlandish place in the first instance: her imagination has the natural allure of the everyday English girl of style, yet is wreathed in supernatural tempests. Not long ago, I asked her about the paintings she saw in her childhood at the Manchester Art Gallery, all those Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces full of English pageantry and brutality and mystery. She loves their mixture of emotion. She told me she thought that’s what fashion is all about – emotion-in-motion. And with Burton it’s always about the small detail that can make the ordinary seem strange. ‘That painting in Manchester of Ophelia by John Millais is dark and beautiful at the same time,’ she said.

If you look at that painting, which is one of her favourites, you see that Ophelia is being pulled down and drowned by her dress. Sarah laughed when I suggested that a less feisty person might have found it similarly overwhelming to have made the most famous dress of the decade, the one she did for Kate Middleton. She has been intensely private about it, but, in her new open and truthful way, and in a spirit of moving on, she doesn’t mind putting it to rest. ‘Making that dress was no kind of burden at all,’ she says, ‘and it never will be. I loved making the dress, I loved adapting my ideas to suit the person and the occasion, and we put our hearts into it. I respect the intimate nature of that lovely project and I respect the friendships that were forged during it.’ There are days when an artist’s dark instincts will give out to freshness, like a perfect morning after a long night of rain, and that is what Burton achieved with that dress. Under awful media pressure, she produced a beautiful wedding gown laced with enchantment, and in that moment it seemed that the turmoil of the previous year had finally gone.

Relief, experience and imagination. Loyalty, ambition and perfectionism. These are the words that now garland Sarah Burton’s state of mind. She is a mother of two small children who works as if the future is nothing if not a wonderful incitement to action. Her latest creations travel between the captivatingly wild and the vauntingly commercial – it’s the miracle combination that all the great design firms want and, with this kind of capability, Alexander McQueen has quadrupled its profits in the last few years.

When we met at the Wolseley on Piccadilly for lunch the other day, she waved away the consensus about the great time she’s having professionally. ‘This is my idea of a great time,’ she said, as we ordered chips and eclairs, then she turned in a heartbeat to a description of her latest work. ‘We’ve made a fairly accessible collection for Paris this season,’ she said, ‘but with unexpected glimpses and secrets. I want to keep people imagining. I don’t want to be the only one dreaming. And next year we’re going further, looking for beauty and obsession, passion, identity, in places that may be unknown.’

She sets herself amazing tasks. And then she goes after them. Sarah Burton is a woman of our times because she helps remake our times. The fact that she does it with such modesty, and with such a sense of her mentors and collaborators, only enhances her standing as a fabulous talent who has seen her vision grow in both the dark room and on the lighted stage. Her shyness becomes her, yet she has come into her own. Wherever Burton stands in the future, it will be far from anyone’s shadow, for she has made her world her own. We can only applaud a woman who has worked as hard as she has to increase the general capacity for wonder. She upholds the McQueen aesthetic and makes it something more, something classic, something new, and she does it all these days at no extra cost to her own good nature. During one of our encounters, I asked if she’d rather return to Earth as a butterfly or a bee. ‘Oh, a bee,’ she said. ‘I think I’m more of a worker than a painted lady. I like to be with everybody else, working.’

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